With the rise of social media, the importance on how we want to be perceived and how others perceive us has increased exponentially. Especially among youthful subjects, the overvaluation of the imaginary causes an inhibiting rise in angst – adolescents mould themselves in the image of the other and hide what they truly love and drain their speech from subjective signifiers.     

Asuna Yanagi, the director of Rainy Blue, struggled with the inhibiting consequence of the confrontation with parental and peer expectations. Yanagi, however, succeeded in breaking through this suffocating dynamic by affirming her desire and make a feature film. With this film – the product of her struggles, she reaffirms the importance of living in accordance to one’s desire and encourage struggling young people to choose desire over image.  

Yanaga’s film offers the spectator a glance at a defining time for Aoi (Asuna Yanagi), last-year at Tamana High School. Despite being proud of being a junior of the legendary actor Ryu Chishu, she is unable to image her own future. As her graduation approaches, she is not only faced with pressure from the parental and educational Other to decide her future path, but also with the impeding closure of the school’s film club. Then, one summer afternoon, she discovers an old battered script in the clubroom.

Asuna Yanagi opens her narrative by introducing the spectator to the devious behaviour of Aoi and her friends, Syoko (-), Asuka (-) and Karin (-). Right from the get-go, it is evident that their devious behaviour (e.g. have lunch on the roof, trying to light fireworks, curling hair, eating gum, …) are nothing other than rebellious acts against the Other of the school, the authority that stipulates the law.

The frivolous way Asuka apologizes to the teacher and the lackadaisical way Syoko asks for another reflection paper echoes, quite beautifully, that the authority figure they address is radically castrated. In this sense, their acts of rebellion confront the Other with his own castration, with the fact that the Other, despite functioning as an authority figure, is not given the girls’ right to function as one. The consequence of this impotence – we do not consider you as an authority figure – is that his signifiers are unable to sort any kind of formative effect. 

The teacher attempts to reaffirm his position of authority by demanding that they review one of the three Ozu films currently screening at the Denkikan – all films that feature the school’s alumni Chishū Ryū, do cleaning around the school, and attend a parent-teacher meeting. However, while the girls must undergo his punishment, his attempt to affirm himself as an authority figure is in vain as his crude intervention merely causes them to qualify bald head as a criminal who sabotages their precious seishun.

It is important to emphasize that while the indirect acting-out against authority figures, against the boring adults, is generally confined to the period of adolescence, a similar subjective stance toward those who enter one’s space as the vehicle or the voice of the law is common in adulthood as well. The relation to the law and those who represent it (or at least try it) within the societal field will, for must subjects, always be complicated – a meek abiding mixed with a unvocalized, yet fantasized rebellion.  

The playful transgressions of our girls must, however, also be interpreted as an indication of a struggle that cannot be vocalized and as an appeal to the adult Other to recognize what they fail to put into signifiers. In this light, the punishing teacher falters because he is unable to discern the fundamental question the girls pose to him with their acts.   

The question they are faced with concerns the decision of what to do with their lives. The inability to answer, the flight from the demand to find an answer echoes in the empty moments the girls engage in – e.g. lying listlessly in bed, skipping of school. Aoi’s excessive watching of movies is, in this sense, not an attempt to find a guiding light to organize her step into adulthood but a well-constructed defence against the pressing question of what to do with one’s life, a question made present by the adults (e.g. her father) around her.

Her decision to write a screenplay, on the other hand, constitutes the first step into formulating an answer to the question of her own desire. However, she struggles and it should be evident that this struggle is a direct manifestation of her untouched uncertainty concerning her future. To put it differently, the reason why she struggles to find her plot is because she has not fully committed herself to a signifier to guide her own life (i.e. her dream of becoming a film director).

Yet, her wish to write a screenplay does instigate an important subjective change: she opens her closed eye to the other and turns herself into an observer, into an author searching for inspiration in the others that make up her societal field. Can she, by turning into an eye and writer, sketch out the possibility for herself to commit herself, once and for all, to her dream? Can she compel the Other give her the necessary signifier-of-support?  

The composition of Rainy Blue offers a pleasing mix of static and fluid spatial dynamic moments and its restraint visual rhythm is function of Yanagi’s reliance on long takes. There are some moments of shaky framing to be noted in the composition. Yanagi turns to such framing to amplify the impact of moments of interpersonal confrontation and invite the spectator to empathize with Aoi’s subjective stalemate and the interactional struggles this deadlock causes.

Asuna Yanagi gives a convincing performance as Aoi. The reason why she succeeds in charming the spectator and bringing the struggle of her character so satisfactorily to life is quite simple: she has lived through this struggle. Rainy Blue is, in a certain sense, not simply a narrativization of her own youthful struggles, but the product that affirms her commitment to the art of film.

With Rainy Blue, Asuna Yanagi does not simply deliver a heartwarming coming-of-age narrative, but also a work that has the potential to inspire young people. With the rise of social media and the trivialisation of the act of imagining, the message to trust our own desire and carve a position out in the Other for our subjectivity instead of following the beaten path of expectations is not only highly relevant but necessary to wake (Japanese) youth out of their ‘mediatized’ slumber.